Many stocks do not pay dividends, but people still buy them. Amazon has never paid a dividend - yet there's plenty of people who have been made rich by buying amazon stock. You wouldn't call anyone an idiot for buying amazon stock, would you?

One can argue that bitcoin and amazon's value are the same. You buy them, and they pay you in the form of increases in value. Most people buy amazon stock and bitcoin for the same reasons right now. However, bitcoin is actually a useable currency - it's just that the network is overloaded and the fees are too high at the moment for it to be feasible to use for any transaction under a thousand USD or so.

and cannot be used as a practical currency, then does it have any value at all beyond speculative?

The US dollar has no inherent value, other than the fact that you believe it does because one government says it has value. It also experiences significant inflation. Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies are deflationary because their supply is fixed. So it's a little misleading to think of cryptocurrency values as having the same dynamics as fiat currencies.

If so it seems hard to see it as anything but a bubble. At least the dotcoms had the *potential* to earn money in the future from trading or selling advertising.

Either way, the first wave of any new technology does tend to fail hard after being over-hyped and failing to meet expectations. Then after a few years and the technology matured, a slower, second wave comes and actually works.

I see bitcoin as the excite search engine. It's the first cryptocurrency that actually functioned well. The next one will be the Yahoo!.
Any smart crypto investor is betting on the next Yahoo! basically - Ripple, Stellar, Cardano, NEM, Raiblocks, etc. may be the next big thing.

Consider this though. Most people thought that the early internet is a joke... it's actually social media sites like myspace that lead to mass adoption of the internet. Now, people can't live without it. I believe that crypto is the same. It has the potential to liberate the masses from monetary control of human behavior, and affect the distribution of wealth. The internet liberated information and globalized it. Crytocurrency can potentially do the same thing.

Many people smarter than you and me are working on making bitcoin 2.0. I really believe in the idea, and do not wish to squander the chance to invest in the next big one..

Always so easy to sum up the salient points from that one. But you got the chance to be hateful, GOOD FOR YOU! And you worked the word "Wino" into your middle of the night trollings. Such appropriateness is unexpected, to say the least.

All parking meters don't pay dividends, but people still put money in them. Again with equating Bitcoin to stock, where the only valid comparison is to an insolvent one, such as Enron. The book on which was titled 'The Smartest Guys in the room." Once again, people smarter than you and I coming up with ways for people dumber than you and I to lose money. (Might Trollbough be Trollbought?)

But no I don't know what its like to own rollercoaster stocks. Since I have no interest in losing money, I don't do such things. You cannot argue Amazon and Bitcoin are, dang, of the same world. Amazon has its own value.

Long ago, when the first copper coins were minted for the shortage of gold and silver, they were imprinted "Not the metal, the TRUST." Few have the trust in Bitcoin.

There's a whole part to this I won't have time to write this minute. But by the time the late night wino comes around it'll be up. Meanwhile the only joke of the early internet was asking people to invest vast sums in losing operations. Which they did. . . .

Your best comparison for the Bitcoin exchanges is frontier banks i n the first 100 years of America. Bitcoin would be a banknote, much like the Dix of 'Wish I were in Dixie' fame. When a bank failed, the banknote became worthless. Oh, right, exchange problems will have the same effect. At least the bank had been required to have silver coins on hand to buy back at least a few of their banknotes before they failed. No such with Bitcoin.

Banknotes played a major role in building America at a time when there was little federal money, not many reliable state dollars, not even much gold and silver to pay other countries with. Banknotes also bankrupted various parts of the country at different times.

The only good news is there is so little crypto it won't be much of a drag when people realize they're holding the bag as it is finally recognized as worthless.

Appreciate some stocks are traded speculatively, but ostensibly Amazon et al are raising capital to invest in growing the business/building infrastructure that will hopefully eventually result in a highly profitable business capable of paying dividends. The "real" value of the stock would then be increased. It might well fail instead, but there is at least a chance.

Buying bitcoin at present, though, seems very much like buying a tulip bulb. It will never be useful, you just hope someone else will pay more for it in the future (they themselves hoping they can sell it to someone else and it suddenly seems like a Ponzi scheme).

Unless I have overlooked something, and bitcoin might at some point in the future have a real use, such as occasionally transferring large amounts of wealth (house purchase, moving investments?)

Appreciate that fiat currencies have no inherent value either, but they are useful. Bitcoin was once too, but now it isn't.

Like you say, bitcoin 2.0 or another crypto currency may well work as a useable currency and so have "value" as a useable thing and be a sensible investment. But at that point the original bitcoin will surely become worthless and thus prove it was nothing but a bubble?

I find the crypto currencies interesting and look forward to finding out how they work out, but I honestly don't understand the behind-the-scenes workings nearly well enough to think I could hope to make an informed decision about investing in them. I mean, to invest smartly in bitcoin you need to be abreast of the internal politics and in-fighting, right?

Sidenote: Amazon was a very smart investment with hindsight, but was it in the early days? Plenty of very similar startups went to the wall and retrospectively were an awful investment.

Sidenote: Amazon was a very smart investment with hindsight, but was it in the early days? Plenty of very similar startups went to the wall and retrospectively were an awful investment.

Amazon didn't go public until the public was clamoring for it. Boggy AT&T isn't letting me search for the numbers, but the first day of the IPO boomed and kept booming.

Amazon did not make money for like a decade and when the stock was introduced, people still thought the internet was a joke.
Nobody knew what the bookseller had in store.

It also went from a peak of $100 in late '99 and gradually slid ~$10 and hung out there for a couple years. That's a 90% drop over a long period of time. Magnitudes worse than what you just saw with bitcoin.

Now imagine exactly what kind of fortitude it took to stick with amazon stock. It would take an investor like Buffet to have that kind of patience. There were many articles about amazon being a complete dud.

So I am partialy a newb but if I bought Bitcoin in 2013 and held it and now I have both bitcoin cash and bitcoin SWEET!!!

So I made even more money then I thought Well... actually Im holding till I get my moon And techicly you only make or loose money when you sell... But I belive this or a version of this is the money we will use for ~ 100-200 years.... So the term selling doesn't really apply... But maybe in a few years I will pay off my house

Anyways my question is if you put you Bitcoin on a paper wallet does this still count? Or did it need to be saved on an extange online?

Mine was online and I was seeing bitcoin cash or bitcoin but this christmas I took some of the bitcoin out of the online wallet and transefered it onto paper wallets for my wife and son for them to save/hide for the long term. If there is another fork will this meen they don't get the rewards of the fork??

So confusing.... But to my newbness I got more free money then I thought

Appreciate some stocks are traded speculatively, but ostensibly Amazon et al are raising capital to invest in growing the business/building infrastructure that will hopefully eventually result in a highly profitable business capable of paying dividends. The "real" value of the stock would then be increased. It might well fail instead, but there is at least a chance.

Amazon didn't make a profit on paper for a long time because Bezos was busy reinvesting nearly every penny into the business.
This is something that is very important to know when looking at an investment. This will not show in most short form analyses of business numbers. So you can't just rely on looking at graphs to be informed enough to buy.

Buying bitcoin at present, though, seems very much like buying a tulip bulb. It will never be useful, you just hope someone else will pay more for it in the future (they themselves hoping they can sell it to someone else and it suddenly seems like a Ponzi scheme).

Unless I have overlooked something, and bitcoin might at some point in the future have a real use, such as occasionally transferring large amounts of wealth (house purchase, moving investments?)

Bitcoin is very useful for doing pretty much everything banks and other financial institutions can do, but with less limiting factors in the way. Last year i had to do an international wire transfer to China to buy a large amount of electric bike parts. The fee on $3000 USD was something like $40 USD. I also spent 30 minutes at my local credit union doing the wire transfer. There were papers to fill, faxes to send, and multiple people involved. It was ridiculous. it also took multiple days to clear before the parts could be shipped.

Using a currency like ethereum, i could have clicked 'send' from my wallet and expected the money to go from my wallet, to the seller's wallet in an average time of 30 minutes. The fee to me would have been lower, and the seller would not have to pay as high of a currency conversion rate.

Here is a screenshot from a public transaction tracker site, showing a transaction i just made from my ethereum wallet, which my mining rewards are stored, to bittrex, the cryptocurrency exchange i use. ( I want to buy some Stellar Lumens today! )

As you can see, the fee is around 1-1.5 percent. Ethereum's TX fees are actually not that great at the moment, but it didn't help that the size of my transaction was very small. The larger the transaction, the smaller the fee tends to be.

Just consider a company like Visa. They may very well handle the most transactions of any company. Visa makes 15 billions a year just nipping people with tiny fees left and right. This nips into the profit margins of nearly every business on every continent. Settlement is actually slow, as well. Some people think that bitcoin is slow, with transactions taking up to a day.. well, 24 hours is actually the shortest time you're going to actually receive money from your credit card vendor. A more typical time is an entire week. Also, international visa fees are around 2-3%, which is a lot.

Most cryptocurrencies are also great stores of value, even if the value swings like mad due to speculation. Pretty much every government created ( fiat ) currency is eroded by inflation, which means that the only way to keep your money's value is to invest in bonds, the stock market, or whatever. A majority of cryptocurrencies are deflationary.

Cryptocurrencies also internationalize money. You can deposit and withdraw anywhere around the world. Nobody stands between you and your money. It's not unlike an old school swiss bank account..

So cryptocurrency does have a lot of applications. It is useful today. I have bought and sold things with bitcoin, ethereum, and even the obscure vertcoin.

Like you say, bitcoin 2.0 or another crypto currency may well work as a useable currency and so have "value" as a useable thing and be a sensible investment. But at that point the original bitcoin will surely become worthless and thus prove it was nothing but a bubble?

Nobody really knows. Cryptocurrency is still at the bleeding edge. So many different groups are trying all sorts of different ideas on how a cryptocurrency should work. My prediction is that bitcoin will be completely usurped this year. I have not seen any signs that the development team has anything in the oven to change that.

And bitcoin fell from almost 90% of cryptocurrency useage down to 35% in 2017. It's price increases have slowed down a lot as well. It's not something i would put any of my money in.

I find the crypto currencies interesting and look forward to finding out how they work out, but I honestly don't understand the behind-the-scenes workings nearly well enough to think I could hope to make an informed decision about investing in them. I mean, to invest smartly in bitcoin you need to be abreast of the internal politics and in-fighting, right?

That's exactly the right attitude to approach any investment. Jumping in for the quick money and not reading up beforehand is exactly how 75% of investors lose their shorts. Yes, there is a lot to know, and a lot to keep up on. It can become an obsession and part time job very quickly. I jumped right into the game after a year of reading investment books and found that this market is wilder than the stock market by a factor of 10 or maybe 100, but a lot of the same strategies ( buy, hold, and when your emotions run high, DO NOT MAKE A MOVE ) professed by greats like Peter Lynch and Warren Buffet actually work in this space.

There are also many magnitudes of FUD and hype of utter garbage, compared to stocks. Pumps and dumps galore. Out of the thousand or so cryptocurrencies, there are only a dozen or so that are going to be worth a shit.

I wouldn't recommend anyone make this their first investment. Start out with something safe and boring like a vanguard index fund ( which returned 21% this year, by the way! ), which is literally the pet rock of investments, as it tracks the entire market and you don't need to spend every day with your nose planted in a copy of the wall street journal or really even think about it at all.

People get stupid with single stock investing though, and they get even more stupid with crypto... however, the crypto market is in a boom and is very forgiving when it comes to mistakes.

Me? i take the index fund approach. My portfolio is diversified amongst the top currencies. During this big correction, i saw my small share of bitcoin dive down ~40% but my other currencies actually held pretty well, and in the past 4 days, i've seen the non-bitcoins blow way past previous highs before the correction. So glad i stayed in while others were jumping out of buildings on december 22

I don't doubt the utility of Ethereum - it sounds like it's doing what bitcoin was promising/ought to have been doing. It satisfies a demand (low cost, easy global transactions) and is practical for everyday use (fast, cheap).

My issue is that bitcoin has lost it's utility (I can't afford to be paid in it, can't pay my bills in it, can't buy a beer with it), yet it's the one crypto-currency that mainstream investors seem desperate to get their hands on. That's what makes me suspicious it's pure bubble.

Index funds is the only investment I've seriously considered, thanks for the Vanguard suggestion, normally I think of S&P 500. I'm not well read on investing, but I've read a few analyses by statisticians to convince me that no investor has demonstrated an ability to *consistently* outperform the market.

Amazon did not make money for like a decade and when the stock was introduced. . . .

Umm, noooooo, Amazon made money probably in the first SECOND after it went public at whatever time that day at $18. A few hours later it closed at "$23 1/2." Prior to Facebook it was the definition of the IPO thrill ride.

Note the movement of your chart in just a few days, according to the top scale. With the area of $500 taking up an inch, I'd say at a year it seems to indicate the approach to $100. That graph makes it look like a stupendous investment right off the back. That is backed up by the stock splits in 1998 and 1999, then again in 1999. In less than 2.5 years the stock value soared to require it being split to 12 shares for each on initially sold. Real numbers just won't come up for me, but I'd guess they cut it to still be more than $18 a share, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was up to the $50 a share the graph indicates AFTER the splits and the original one share beng worth $600, meaning it's a poor quality, inaccurate graph that dramatically underreports the profits made, only following the individual share price rather than the return on investment and DIPPING when the rise caused it to be split although the value was still going up. Let's use an easier to read graph that says it's adjusted to the splits. http://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/chart ... ce-history Any give back in the price remained comfortably into the profit if you were an initial buyer. Of course if you bought at the peak you were losing something.

So Amazon came into this world a big money maker. Of course there's people all over the internet saying differently to try to support some point they wish they could make. They are aided by the lack of real detailed info, I sure can't find it. Only articles that rave on and on without telling much. And of course the pulled from thin air opinions that are quite wrong.

So I am partialy a newb but if I bought Bitcoin in 2013 and held it and now I have both bitcoin cash and bitcoin SWEET!!!

Anyways my question is if you put you Bitcoin on a paper wallet does this still count? Or did it need to be saved on an extange online?

Mine was online and I was seeing bitcoin cash or bitcoin but this christmas I took some of the bitcoin out of the online wallet and transefered it onto paper wallets for my wife and son for them to save/hide for the long term. If there is another fork will this meen they don't get the rewards of the fork??

When the fork occurred in August, the blockchain was duplicated, so as you moved your btc into the paper wallets after the fork, your bitcoin cash is still in its original location with original private keys. Do some research about claiming your bitcoin cash on your preferred wallet, most support it now.

If there were to be another fork, there's no functional difference if you're storing in a paper wallet, a hardware wallet, software wallet etc. You actually don't want it to be in an exchange as you don't retain the control, so if the exchange you're using opts not to support the fork then your coins are trapped.

On that note, if anybody has any substantial quantity of crypto currency I'd highly recommend keeping it long term in a hardware wallet like a ledger and NOT in an exchange... exchanges get hacked all the time and you can lose it all. Paper wallets are okay, but at some point they were digital and printed, so still less secure than a hardware device that requires two factor authentication for any transfer.

I don't doubt the utility of Ethereum - it sounds like it's doing what bitcoin was promising/ought to have been doing. It satisfies a demand (low cost, easy global transactions) and is practical for everyday use (fast, cheap).

Well actually, ethereum has been failing to do what bitcoin promised to do in the last year - it still has a huge scaling problem. Fees are lower, transaction speed is a bit higher, but people using it as a bridge currency to buy less popular coins are still jamming it up.

( however, the ethereum team is working rather hard on various scaling solutions. Whereas the bitcoin core group is just basically sitting on it's hands while the bitcoin network remains backlogged. )

What makes Ethereum special is it's ability to do distributed computing, trustless contracts, and a lot of other interesting hat tricks. You could essentially run a legal system or government off ethereum. The Cryptokitties distributed app is probably one of the most mainstream examples of an early distributed app.

My issue is that bitcoin has lost it's utility (I can't afford to be paid in it, can't pay my bills in it, can't buy a beer with it), yet it's the one crypto-currency that mainstream investors seem desperate to get their hands on. That's what makes me suspicious it's pure bubble.

The funny thing is that doesn't stop anyone from using it. It's essentially now a store of value and a way to bridge your fiat currency over to exchanges so you can buy one of the ~1,500 coins out there. A lot of people use ethereum and litecoin for the same reason. There's a few altcoins like stellar lumens ( my current favorite ) that could actually act as a payment medium in the future, although these currencies are still at a young stage of development and adoption.

People buy all kinds of useless shit coins in the crypto world. The crypto world is more irrational of a market than i've ever heard of. It is not like stocks, where facts and figures matter. It is almost completely hype driven.

But you know, over the last 2 days i made around $1,500.. i can't stay out of this market with gains like that on the table.. however, i haven't put more money than i can afford to lose.

Index funds is the only investment I've seriously considered, thanks for the Vanguard suggestion, normally I think of S&P 500. I'm not well read on investing, but I've read a few analyses by statisticians to convince me that no investor has demonstrated an ability to *consistently* outperform the market.

Yeah, it's true. It's hard to go wrong with an index fund, and in particular, vanguard as a company. The top mutual funds of all time only periodically beat a fund like VTSAX, but when they do, the fees on the fund are usually so high that it wipes out the advantage, because you're paying hot shot top 1% master day traders to work your money for you. Mutual funds give bad returns and have high fees. Individual stock picking, unless you're an expert, tends to do worse than that and is more subject to pure luck..

Whereas with an index fund, you're essentially paying the world's best stock picking algorithm to do all the work for you. And then with vanguard, you're with an investor owned company ( you are literally considered a board member and get to vote on policies ), thus your fees are about as low as they could possibly get because there are less fat cats at the top of the company to pay.

If you wanna learn more about this lazy form of investing... start googling 'financial independence', 'early retirement', 'mr money moustache', and 'mad fientist'.. it will lead you down a very interesting rabbit hole.

So Amazon came into this world a big money maker. Of course there's people all over the internet saying differently to try to support some point they wish they could make. They are aided by the lack of real detailed info, I sure can't find it. Only articles that rave on and on without telling much. And of course the pulled from thin air opinions that are quite wrong.

If you look at their financials, amazon did not look good for a long time. Amazon stock also dive bombed for a while. Not only have they never produced a dividend, but on paper, they lost money for more years than they made it.
It's only the last few years that an amazon investor looks like a smart person and not a fool.

Same thing with bitcoin.

PS - looks like bitcoin is back to it's previous average value. Stellar, ripple, cardano, NEM, and Tron all exploded in the last 7 days, but we'll see how long those gains last. I happen to own 4 of 5 of the big gainers... i've got nothing to cry about

I would highly recommend anyone with a decent amount of bitcoin to get a hardware wallet and get it off the exchange. I use a Trezor and it is pretty easy to set up and transfer to. Now I don't have to worry about my coins disappearing from an exchange or my account getting closed or locked.

I wonder what will happen to the fees when it's like 50 cents again. But the online currency exchange sites are all over the place on current value. Some still say over $10k. Imagine the arbitrage one could engage in. Imagine the repetition of 1998.

For people outside the crypto world a 30% drop might seem like the end or definitely a turn for the worst...but for people that have been involved for a while this is really nothing new. There were 5 drops of 30% or more for bitcoin in 2017. All of these were followed by an even more bullish upswing than previously seen. This is in fact to be expected when you look at previous years price in January - there is always a large drop. Last year bitcoin dropped under $800 around this time. Even at 10k this is still nearly a 1300% increase in value in a year.

I doubt it'll live to drop that far. Kind of like a meteorite burning up in the atmosphere and never reaching the ground.

I don't know i think its more of a Go-NO GO thing if they fix the problems it will take off again if they don't it will fizzle out and deflate quite quick... I imagine this year it might go as low as 3-5k then end of the year or even next year if they work on the problems it will take off again.... If they don't everyone will pull their money and move on.

But one thing to note is Bitcoin is the one on top.... and all the others have similar price charts even though the numbers are different when bitcoin goes up they all go up when it drops they all drop (for the most part.) It's worth taking advantage of buying more as they drop... Nonetheless I treat CRYPTO like a Loto ticket with way better chances... Spend a few hundred at the right time and you can retire 10 years later... Way I see it is if you invest maybe $250 into you 10 best picks at the right time and 9 of them fail but 1 makes you 500k-1mill then you don't care about losing the 2250 you lost on the other 9. What will happen as this plays out is the USD or CDN whatever your local currency is will drop in value both from inflation and from people losing faith in it. If I time it right I will pay off my mortgage.